Matthews, Samantha; (1997) Representations of the grave in nineteenth-century English poetry: A selected commentary. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The Victorian 'celebration of death' is most evident to us now in large suburban cemeteries with their ostentatious monuments; yet they show only one aspect of nineteenth- century death and burial, concealing the Romantic opposition to material memorialisation which runs through the century's poetry. In this project I present readings of grave-poetry set in the socio-historical context, and explore moments of self-reflexive anxiety about personal and literary mortality, when poets contemplate their own graves, their children's graves, and the graves of precursor poets. Most of the poets considered are not canonical (in the sense of being widely read or taught): they include William Allingham, Alexander Anderson, Edwin Arnold, Alfred Austin, William Edmondstoune Aytoun, Edmund Gosse, Cecil Frances Humphreys, Letitia Landon, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, David Macbeth Moir, Francis Turner Palgrave, John Critchley Prince, Bryan Waller Procter, Hardwick Drummond Rawnsley, Douglas B. W. Sladen, Robert Southey, John Thelwall, Martin F. Tupper and William Watson. I respond to the critical challenges presented by 'less read' poems by employing an 'eclectic hermeneutics' which includes a family- orientated revision of Harold Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' thesis. Chapter 1 examines poems which reflect the social history of burial in the nineteenth century, covering issues such as the country churchyard aesthetic, body-snatching, city churchyards, suburban cemeteries and cremation. Chapter 2 is concerned with the parent- poet's representation of children's graves, specifically fathers and their anxiety about disruption of the generational order. Chapter 3 discusses representations of the graves of Keats and Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, where for example I read Adonais in the context of premature death and a Victorian myth of poetic brotherhood. Chapter 4 examines poems about the graves of five significant poets (Hemans, Wordsworth, the Brownings and Tennyson), looking at the the influence of gender on tribute verse and the Romantic rejection and Victorian recuperation of Poets' Comer and the Laureateship. The grave is a rich and varied trope, found in elegies, eulogies, ballads, devotional and consolatory verse, poems of social criticism, suicide, marginality and political injustice. The poems I discuss were derived from a survey of the period 1800-1900 on the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Full-Text Database, Software Version 4.0 (1995), augmented by my own research. I present some results of this survey in an appendix, with a short account of genres and tropes where graves appear, and an anthology of representative poems.

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